16th June 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
New tutors often ask us whether they need to apply for a CRB disclosure before they can begin tutoring, and the answer is no. However, we do offer the service of applying for disclosures on a tutor’s behalf, which might seem confusing: why do we do this if they’re not a necessary requirement for a tutor to begin tutoring?
Well the truth is that we’re not legally allowed to make a CRB disclosure a requirement when someone registers with us. They were originally created to allow employers to decide whether or not they wanted to employ someone, and since we don’t employ our tutors (they are regarded as self-employed), we’re not allowed to process disclosures without the help of another organisation, and we’re not allowed to make them a requirement. However, even without this rule, we wouldn’t make CRB checks a requirement, because they’re simply not designed for the purpose.
Consider what a CRB actually is: it’s a snapshot in time of a tutor’s criminal record, and if the tutor committed an offence the day after the CRB was processed, it won’t appear on the check. The strange thing is that some people will ask for a tutor with a CRB disclosure which is at most 3-4 years old.
At Blue Tutors we think that a system which allows an up-to-date view of a tutor’s criminal record (with that tutor’s permission of course) would be a much better idea, and would give parents exactly what they want. This has been dismissed as a breach of data protection, but one could argue that the real reason is that The Criminal Records Bureau would not be able to charge the amount that they currently do for an online service.
So, in summary, we don’t believe that a CRB disclosure is very important at all. What is far more important is that tutors, parents and students take reasonable steps to protect themselves by observing the best practice in child protection, and we wish that parents would take this aspect more seriously, and not consider a piece of paper to be a guarantee that a tutor is unquestionably safe.
Having written everything above, a tutor with a CRB disclosure does appear to be more dedicated than a tutor without one, and this can be an important factor. CRB disclosures may not prove that someone is beyond reproach, but many parents will see a disclosure as a sign that they’ve found a dedicated and serious tutor.